OVERVIEW:
Of the 52 million acres of protected Wilderness in the lower forty-eight states, domestic livestock are authorized to graze 13 million acres, over a quarter of the total acreage. Due to the grazing language in the Wilderness Act and its 1980s-era corollary, the Congressional Grazing Guidelines, grazing has been occurring in otherwise-undomesticated Wilderness areas for over half a century. Grazing does extreme damage to Wilderness, yet at less than one-tenth of a percent of all forage fed to livestock in the United States, grazing in Wilderness hardly contributes to the U.S. livestock industry. Comparatively, Wilderness areas are of little importance to the vast amount of livestock raised in the U.S., yet they are extraordinarily important for biodiversity, scientific study, recreation, and the preservation of wildness.

Livestock grazing is fundamentally at odds with the ideals of the Wilderness Act. Livestock grazing in Wilderness creates conflict with native species, including bighorn sheep, salmon, grizzly bears, sage-grouse, amphibians, and rare plants. It also contributes to a “de-wilding” of the landscape for visitors, many of whom head to Wilderness areas to escape reminders of humankind’s influence. It diminishes an area’s wilderness character and the opportunity for present and future generations to experience the unique benefits that authentic Wilderness provides.

Currently, the Congressional Grazing Guidelines explicitly prohibit curtailing grazing solely because an area is designated Wilderness. They also permit the perpetuation of existing facilities, and in some cases the construction of new facilities, as well as the occasional use of motorized equipment to facilitate grazing operations. The Guidelines are clear in their intent that livestock grazing shall be permitted to continue within Wilderness; they do not, however, mandate that grazing must be present in perpetuity. The Guidelines have led to the absurd situation where livestock grazing is understood by land management agencies to have more permanence in Wilderness than elsewhere on public lands. Congress should remedy that misinterpretation.

RECOMMENDATIONS:
Congress can take two courses of action that would significantly increase protection for designated Wilderness while avoiding conflict with current grazing permittees. First, Congress can enact a law that says if a public lands grazing permittee voluntarily relinquishes a grazing permit, the Wilderness lands covered by the permit would never again be grazed by livestock. The land management agencies would permanently retire the permit, reallocating forage to wildlife and allowing associated grazing allotments to recover from livestock grazing. Third parties would have the incentive to compensate permittees, knowing that the Wilderness would be permanently off-limits to livestock grazing. This is the approach codified in PL 114-46, the Sawtooth National Recreation Area and Jerry Peak Wilderness Additions Act, and S. 1167, the Owyhee Wilderness Areas Boundary Modifications Act, and promoted in the “Rural Economic Vitalization Act” legislation introduced in the last two Congresses.

Second, Congress can direct the land management agencies to close any currently vacant allotments in Wilderness to grazing. This would protect recreational, wildlife, scientific, and ecological values and would significantly reduce the number of acres that could potentially be reopened to grazing. Because vacant allotments are not assigned to individual users, they could be closed without being waived to the agency by a permittee.

 

Read our GRAZING POLICY PAPER.

 

GRAZING DATA:

We have compiled data for every grazing allotment in every Wilderness. You can view the data as PDF files:

A Note about the Data

To acquire our grazing data, Wilderness Watch sent information requests to the federal agencies and contacted Wilderness specialists within the agencies. Wilderness Watch sent formal letters to Forest Service regional offices west of the Mississippi River (Regions 1 through 6) and to each Bureau of Land Management state office, and we questioned Wilderness specialists with the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

The information requested included:

  • A document showing the name and/or number of each grazing allotment in Wilderness, whether in whole or in part;

  • The status of each allotment (e.g. vacant or active);

  • The class of livestock for each allotment (e.g. cow or sheep);

  • The acreage of each allotment (including, if possible, the Wilderness and non-Wilderness acreage identified separately for those allotments that are partially within Wilderness);

  • The AUMs for each allotment (including, if possible, the AUMs in Wilderness and those out of wilderness identified separately for those allotments that are partially within Wilderness); and

  • A map that shows allotments, with identifying names or numbers, with a Wilderness boundary overlay.

The quality of the information we received varied considerably. In some instances, electronic or hard copies of spreadsheets were provided that showed the amount of allotment acreage in and out of Wilderness. Where electronic data was readily available, a Wilderness Watch board member with GIS mapping skills aided in producing maps with detailed acreage figures.

In many instances, it was necessary to estimate what percentage of a grazing allotment fell within Wilderness when the allotment crossed both Wilderness and non-Wilderness acreage. This was done by relying upon maps that were provided to us by the agencies, or by viewing allotment maps and Wildernesses overlaid onto Google Earth. Incomplete data often necessitated searching through databases detailing thousands of allotments in order to find specific allotments within Wilderness. Some databases had duplicative or incomplete information regarding the amount of grazing within Wilderness. With few exceptions, we had to assume that, when an allotment crossed both Wilderness and non-Wilderness acreage, the amount of grazing that took place in Wilderness was reflective of the percentage of the allotment that was in Wilderness.

In sum, we compiled data for every grazing allotment in every Wilderness. We then built a database of the amount of grazing in each unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System. We feel the information we have compiled is as accurate as possible and very close to what is happening on the ground. Every attempt was made to verify the information we received by crosschecking it with secondary sources, particularly when the supplied information was incomplete or inconsistent.


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P: 406-542-2048
E: wild@wildernesswatch.org

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Minneapolis, MN 55406

P: 612-201-9266

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Moscow, ID 83843

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